Artistic algorithm

When a new painting was unveiled in Amsterdam earlier this month, even an expert eye would be forgiven for thinking that this was a newly discovered work by the Dutch master.

But the image of a 17th-century man staring out from the canvas was not painted by Rembrandt’s brush, but built layer by layer by a 3D printer. Nor was the subject based on one of the artist’s friends or patrons, but on millions of data points extracted from the body of his life’s work.

‘All I can say about the outcome is that I see a person not a computer image. For me it shows that this marriage between data and art is still in the honeymoon stage,’ says Bas Korsten, executive creative director at J Walter Thompson Amsterdam.